Following the success of 'The Corrections' and the publication of 'The Discomfort Zone' and 'How To Be Alone', Jonathan Franzen began work on his next novel.

Jonathan Franzen is the author of "The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History"; the essay collection "How to Be Alone"; and the novels "Strong Motion," "The Twenty-Seventh City," and "The Corrections."

A number of others spring to mind, including a recent review of Laura Kipnis's "The Female Thing" and Daniel Mendelsohn's review of Jonathan Franzen's "The Discomfort Zone."

The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History is a 2006 memoir by Jonathan Franzen, who received the National Book Award for Fiction for his novel The Corrections in 2001.

According to L'espresso, The Discomfort Zone reflects the values and contradictions of the American midwest in the 1960s.

Discomfort Zone (3:17)

In his new memoir, "The Discomfort Zone," Mr. Franzen turns his unforgiving eye on himself and succeeds in giving us an odious self-portrait of the artist as a young jackass: petulant, pompous, obsessive, selfish and overwhelmingly self-absorbed.

Since The Corrections Franzen has published How to Be Alone (2002), a collection of essays including "Perchance To Dream", and The Discomfort Zone (2006), a memoir.

It also probes the influence of his childhood and adolescence on his creative life, which is then further explored in The Discomfort Zone.

This illumination that "The Discomfort Zone" provides about the origins of that persona helps explain, in turn, a wider failing in Franzen's work: its lack of humanizing softness.